Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation (CWP) provides mental health and specialist care services to a local population of around one million people. When it decided to review how its communications strategy was supporting community-based care, CWP turned to Vodafone and our partner Flexility to ensure it was relevant. Working together, we produced a three-year mobility strategy designed to make better use of office space while reducing administration time. The strategy also identified how thousands of extra hours can be reclaimed for employees to spend with service users.

First we reviewed CWP’s communications to determine its requirements for the next three years. Flexility asked staff to complete an online survey, providing insights into their existing working practices, what they thought they needed in order work more efficiently, and how ready they were for change. The results were used to shape a vision of how CWP staff should work in the future and what investments would be needed in people, processes and technology to realise it.

Developing a strategy

Based on that work we developed a model identifying four different types of working practice at CWP, from fully home-based work to fully office-based work. We overlaid the necessary technology and applications needed to help employees be more collaborative and effective, enabling CWP to create a consistent, unified strategy.

CWP currently has 2,700 employees spread across 75 sites. With the recommendations of our Better ways of working team, CWP should be able to create cost savings, efficiencies and the opportunity to regain a potential 200 working years annually – time that can in the future be spent directly with people in the community.